Stiff
by RainDragon
Summary: He hadn't seen this coming. He cursed his eyes for being so blind. Angsty Neji x Tenten. Drabble. Rated for character death.


Some angsty drabble. Neji/Tenten centric. This is the result of rereading many of **everstarrr's **stories... in particular, _Switch._ (Check out her archive-- I doubt you'll be disappointed.)

Kindly read and review.

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He hadn't seen this coming.

He had always thought of his vision as perfect. His ice-white eyes cut with a precision that was alien to those with normal sight. They sliced through any barrier without the slightest hint of hesitation or difficulty. He perceived the tiniest fly, eighteen meters away, rotated six degrees and three point two minutes west of due north, twenty-six centimeters south and forty-two centimeters west of an even smaller aphid. He saw _everything._

But not this.

And now, crouched in the muck of dirt and dried blood and surrounded by air translucent with moisture, he cursed his eyes for being so blind. Why had he not seen? Why had this—_this—_fallen into his blind spot? Why hadn't she been in his focus, she instead of the mission who's aim he had now forgotten?

He ran his almost trembling hand down her arm. His eyes were as sharp as ever—though they saw only her body—but his feeling seemed slow, hesitant. The first his fingers recognized was cold. The frigidness of her limb bit into his aching fingers like lacy frost draped over her silent body. It was moments before his nerves recognized the moisture that he felt where the drops of mist had clung to the fine hairs on her arm. And the last he felt was stiff. He has snatched his hand away, with deadened reflexes, when he'd felt it.

The body was stiff. _How long had she been here? _A spark of horror came into his pallid eyes as he recalled her arm beneath his fingertips, and how distinctly he had felt the weary fibers of her body freezing against her cracked, brittle bones.

Like his hands, his heart seemed slow to realize what it felt. He remembered his disinterested surprise when he'd discovered at last that there was no sense of vengeance. In fact, his heart felt almost nothing at all, except the heaviness of his regret. He began to realize how completely he had failed her. He realized how he had neglected to protect her, how he had left her to fight for her own—and how he hadn't even _known _that she had fallen, gone from her long enough for her to become so terribly stiff.

After a time he raised himself with rigid knees, muscles taut from crouching so long. He had not noticed that his Byakugan had gone out—like a candle, burned down to the last of its wick—until he watched her face fade before his eyes, obscured by the unforgiving mist. He remembered how slowly he had blinked, pausing too long to let his eyes close and unhurriedly reopen. Seeing her body again, a broken shadow against the blood-soaked earth, was like scraping raw a wound that had scabbed over, just barely, in the time that he had shut his eyes. He felt the ache of her like a physical pain, and wondered at the scar it would leave.

He began to move his body, numb, away from the remains of her. He remembered the smile she wore the first moment he saw her. He remembered watching her train, the strange marvel he'd felt at the perfection of her aim and the weakness of her strike. He remembered seeing her grow stronger, growing with her through the years, and coming to know her in his own way. He recalled the feel of her lips, her hands on his chest, and her body pressed against his. He saw the blankness of her eyes, as he'd found her, stiff and fading. He wondered at the sadness rising in his throat, and the deadness of the heart beneath his skin.

Her face came into sharp focus in his mind, just as he'd seen her with his penetrating eyes. He made out nothing in it but tragedy. Again he cursed himself, blind, and wondered if he would ever move again without the weight of this regret. He wondered if this pain in him would ever heal, or if it would become a mess of broken, knotted flesh to ever remind him of the wound. Painfully, he ran a hand over his aching chest, feeling for the heart beneath.

He thought he could already feel a scar.


End file.
